Nate Silver Leaves New York Times for ESPN

Statistician Nate Silver, whose nearly dead-on predictions in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections gained him national fame, is moving his FiveThirtyEight blog from the New York Times to ESPN, according to a New York Times report.

Silver is expected to contribute to Keith Olbermann's new ESPN2 show, though no announcement has been made by ESPN, The New York Times or Nate Silver.

It will be a return to form for Silver, who began his rise to statistician fame as a baseball analyst in 2003, predicting baseball player performance using sabermetrics with methods similar to those used in the book and 2011 film "Moneyball."

He used some of those skills to develop his FiveThirtyEight blog that predicted election results. The New York Times bought FiveThirtyEight in 2010; his three-year contract is set to expire in late August, the New York Times report said.

At the height of the 2012 election, Silver's blog drove 20 percent of the New York Times' entire web traffic, according to the New Republic. The newspaper has since discontinued several blogs, including the Green blog in March and Media Decoder in April, for instance.

Silver's 2012 book "The Signal and the Noise" was a New York Times best seller.